My mother’s best friend’s son was an astronaut (so sort of one of those “not a cousin” things.) Went up once then quit after the reentry burnup - being in ground control watching your friends die was hard.
The government spends so much money training astronauts that they want to control your life. “Don’t ride motorcycles.” “Don’t rock climb.” You are taking people who get their rush from risk (or why would you become a test pilot then an astronaut) and you are making them live the life of an actuary.
Pilots always seem to me to be little more than glorified bus drivers.
The planes these days pretty much take off, fly and land themselves, and if they do go wrong there’s not a lot the pilots can actually do in these days of fly-by-wire.
Likewise surgeons… pretty much plumbers except it’s wobbly bits and not copper pipes.
And yeah, being a “journeyman pro” athelete is hard grind.
ISTR reading more than once that astronauts really are (or were in older days) high on the flyboy totem pole regarding attracting the opposite sex. Trying to recall where I read it - something about they have different colored flightsuits or something that attract like moths to a flame.
Most people put technical writing near the top of the glamour professions. Tech writers are typically portrayed as having a bad-ass demeanor and a craving for danger. At a party, when word gets out that the tech writers have arrived, a frisson runs through the crowd. Partygoers jam the bar, hoping to be the one to send over the free drinks. Male tech writers are veritable chick magnets, while the female of the species – well, let’s just say that most guys would give the proverbial left storehouse of reproductive material for half an hour of their time. Smart, edgy, stylish and adventurous – these are all adjectives that are typically applied to the tech writer.
But it’s a gut-busting slog, man, it truly is. If you could see the tech writer at work, taking abuse, eating shit, cowering in corners and being poked with sharp sticks, the magic would be irretrievably lost and the mojo fractured forever. Thank god they work in the bowels of the building with the roaches and other vermin (marketing) where the torment is hidden from the public eye, so the image can survive unscathed.
Also Pilots - still plenty of work for them to do, even if the planes practically fly themselves these days. There is still some glamour in flying and all that, if it’s what you enjoy. What’s NOT at all glamorous is a commercial pilot’s salary - most people don’t realize that most commercial pilot’s don’t get paid shit. They start off at poverty level salaries, and it doesn’t get much better for a while. It’s only at the very highest levels of captaincy that they get to make those 6-figure salaries working 5 days a month that everybody hears about, and those positions are relatively few these days.
I have to say that I disagree with the stock broker comments. As I’m sure in any profession, there is an enormous variation in what it is like between different firms and what position one is in at those firms, but my father is a “stockbroker” and he seems to enjoy his job to a fair degree. Perhaps “financial advisor” is a more appropriate term, but he has a cadre of long-term clients that invest large sums of money with him and he assists them in appropriately managing those portfolios given their long-term life goals, what type of risks they want to take, known financial constraints, etc. It’s an opportunity to play economist if you aren’t sharp enough to become the Federal Reserve Chairman, and also part psychologist through extensive conversation and long-term relationships with clients.
When I saw the movie, Boilerroom I almost had to laugh, it’s so far from what I know of my father’s office. I don’t know, perhaps in his younger days or with other firms, but he’s a partner of his current firm and it isn’t cold-calling little old ladies to get them to invest their grandchildren’s inheritance in penny-stocks.
Nobody would make a movie out of him, but it’s a good living that helps people. What more can one really ask for?
Unacceptable. You are accusing an entire profession of criminal behavior.
This statement would not even be acceptable in the Pit. If you meant it as a joke, there is: 1) no reason to joke about this here and 2) no indication that you meant it as one.
Computer forensics consultant/electronic discovery consultant is definitely one that people go “Oooh!” when I tell them that’s what I do.
It’s about as close to what they’re imagining as CSI is to real police forensics work…
Basically, it’s a lot of grunt work importing & converting files, doing and re-doing quality control and checking, and only about 15% is actually doing something particularly interesting.
We have tools that do all the really hard stuff for us, so other than understanding how things work in operating systems & hardware, we don’t have to know how to write a program to read HD sectors or anything crazy like that.
Data recovery is probably the more “ooh!” inducing than what we do, but it doesn’t sound as sexy.
Jeez, I don’t know. It seems to me there have been plenty of threads that attack lawyers or politicians, painting with a wide brush, essentially accusing them, in passing, of illegal activity. I’m not gonna search for actual quotes, but I mean, haven’t there been posts where someone wrote, for example, “Yeah, sure, you can get a lawyer or politician to try and help you, if you can find one who isn’t too busy taking kickbacks.”
Maybe I’m completely wrong, but aren’t there plenty of posts in that vein? Do we now have to tread on egg shells around all of the lightning rod professions – laywer, doctor, realtor, politician, technical writer?
Being a top level secret government agent is no picnic in real life, I can tell you. Sure, you get to kill the bad guys, and you get to sleep with lots of beautiful women who typically end up dead, drive fancy automobiles recklessly at dizzying speeds, and save the world from imminent disaster, but there is loads of paperwork and the pension is not all that.
Helicopter pilot is hard work under dangerous conditions, and it has historically paid much worse than fixed-wing. You need two hands, two feet and all your attention to keep it upright and in the air. Everyone thinks my husband must get paid tons of $$, but he’s the lowest-paid person on the medical helicopter, works 12-hour shifts, and ends up with way too much overtime because of the chronic pilot shortage (they’re all over in Iraq or Afghanistan).
Still, he can claim lots of cool points and it beats the hell out of a desk job.
Do a lot of people even think of professions like “lawyer,” “doctor” and “stockbroker” as being anything but a lot of hard work with long hours? I think the reasons these jobs are considered glamorous is that they tend to select for intelligent, ambitious people, and they are considered to pay well, which people in this thread overall agree too. However, people generally do not think of doctors and lawyers as having glamorous professions, in the sense of having high-flying, adventurous lives.
Gee…in my company, a Management Consultant is someone who borrows your watch and tells you what time it is. (You’ve probably heard that one before…) So I guess glamour is in the eye of the beholder.
I’d agree. Up until 2004 I was a military helicopter pilot and I have to say I enjoy my life (and paycheck) as a graphic designer waaaaaaaaay more.
A friend of mine used to joke , “Man, I swear it’s cooler to say we fly helicopters than to actualy fly helicopters!”
Mix in the hours, the paperwork and the tight leash of the lifestyle… the glamour and fun ran out pretty quick. Every hour of joy and bliss that you spend in the air has a matching set of pains in the ass. The sad part… I’d do it again as long as the script played out the same way.
My dad is a lawyer. You couldn’t pay me enough to go to law school, personally. It’s a mystery to me why so many people I know are or want to be lawyers. I’d rather dig ditches.
A close associate of mine is a former native of Buffalo, NY and has a sixth degree of separation thing going on with a famous goalie of theirs (sorry can’t name the guy, I’m not a hockey fan). Anyway, I remember hearing him describe his work. He loved it, sure, but how would you feel if every single time you made the tiniest mistake a giant loudass red buzzer went off and thousands of people started screaming curses at you?